Wikibooks:Reading room/Archive 17

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This is an archive of past discussions. Please do not edit the contents of this page.
If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current discussion page


Contents

Hit Counting

I slipped a hit counter into the "consciousness studies" book. The counter file html provided a redirect back to Wikibooks. It used computing power on an ISP's computer, not the Wikibooks servers. The results were 20 hits a day to the first embedded page of the book (not the main page) and 16 hits a day to the PDF versions (apart from the PDF accessible from the Wikibooks main page). This means that a fairly esoteric and academic book such as Consciousness Studies was probably accessed in earnest by at least 50 people a day, possibly more if there were numerous accesses from the front page. This result is very encouraging (hardcopy sales of 18000 academic textbooks on consciousness studies per annum would be amazing, perhaps impossible).

Is it possible to place the Wikimedia hit counters on selected pages for sample periods so that people can tell which books are popular and so that administrators can tell which paths are most popular? It would encourage people to write Wikibooks if they knew they were likely to be widely read. RobinH 18:32, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

I second that. It's dispiriting to spend ages writing and then get no feedback at all. Speaking for myself this is the principal reason for my lack of edits in the last couple of months. perhaps you could give a rcipe for those of us who have never added hit counters to a web page. How much bandwidth is consumed by a hit counter? --kwhitefoot 08:59, 11 April 2006 (UTC)
What I did was to link to my own HTML file: Countit.htm. If you open the file then "View"/"Source" in Internet Explorer you will see that it has a trivial Javascript at the start with a redirect, an "Onclick=" on the BODY that activates the redirect if people click on the page and a counter at the bottom. The hit counter runs on my own ISP's servers, not Wikibook's servers, it does not burden Wikibooks at all. The link to the file is put in place of a link to one of the book's opening pages or as a substitute for the <nowicki>media:consciousness_studies.pdf</nowicki> statement. If you were doing this you would need to copy countit.htm to your own computer, delete the SymError() and SymOnUnload() scripts, amend it for your chosen redirect, insert the code for your own ISP's counter and then upload it to your personal web space. If your ISP does not provide a hit counter (most do) you can search google for freebies (just search for "hit counter"). The link that you add to wikibooks would be to www.YOUR URL/countit.htm - this diverts the user out to your ISP for counting and then, with a click, diverts them back to read the wikibooks page.
Ideally we should have access to a single media wiki counter per book within Wikibooks, run on the Wikibooks servers, that is allowed to run for 1 week only on a given page. This would allow sampling without all the faffing about described above and would not overburden the Wiki servers. RobinH 10:18, 11 April 2006 (UTC)
Yes, having some hitcounters would be nice. At Ada Programming we monitor your success by looking at the download statistic for the demo programms attached to our book. Currently we are at a steady 30 to 40 downloads a month - which is pretty good as it shows the amount of readers interested enought to actualy download the demos. Still it would be nice to know how many readers download the pdf or read the different pages. --Krischik T 11:41, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
You really have to be careful when you just look at hit numbers with a counter. If you actually look at what hosts are viewing the pages, often times you will see that a majority are bots of some sort like Googlebot and MSNbot. 16-20 hits a day to me says it's more random automated traffic and less determined users. A true stats package (not sure how it would work with a simple page inclusion but many are available to analyze Apache logs which I bet is unfortunately unavailable here) to analyze who is viewing a page would be more appropriate in my opinion since you can get much more information. -Matt 13:16, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
Does anyone know who is responsible for the reinstatement of hit counters? We could control for Bots by having some sort of hidden link on the main page (a link that is part of some innocuous text at the bottom of the page). The bots would follow this link but people would not, so the hit count on this could be subtracted from any other hit count to give true views. RobinH 17:20, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
Why do we need hit counters? Why not just sample the server logs? The sampling interval could be chosen to reduce the cpu load to an arbitrarily low value at the expense of timeliness. --kwhitefoot 20:50, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
Do you know how to do that? I have had a look around the stats pages and cannot figure out whether the current dumps are XML or SQL, cannot find any documentation of field names and cannot find any sample code from previous attempts at doing this. RobinH 15:25, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
With the current fiasco that is going on right now with even trying to get somebody with checkuser rights on en.wikibooks, I seriously doubt that anybody here is going to get access to the server logs. That would require developer access, a formal proposal to the Wikimedia Foundation board directly, and some kind of escrow or some other means to strongly demonstrate that you are not going to abuse access to the information. In short, while technically possible as a practical matter it is impossible. The current database dumps are only edit logs, and not access logs. And that information is already available anyway from the history tab on all of the pages, so the db dump would only be useful for large-scale scanning... again to keep bandwith hogging down. --Rob Horning 16:06, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
Which brings us back to using Wiki hit counters on a sample basis only (ie: put them on certain pages for a week then remove them). Orthodox wiki is the first wiki that I found on a google search with the counters still in place. Does anyone know how to do this? RobinH 18:05, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
As Matt says analysing the Apache logs is the best way. I presume that the fear is that the IP addresses of the readers could be used to compromise them somehow. Couldn't we sidestep both the abuse question and the developer access a little by partitioning the problem: ask the developers to provide a filtered Apache log that doesn't include sensitive information; then anyone could analyse the log. The sensitive information is, presumably, the IP address and referer. The Apache Common Log Format puts the client IP address as the first item on the line and doesn't include the referer. The first thing to do would be to replace all the IP addresses that belong to well known spiders by, say, 'spider' and all the remaining ones by, say, 'human'. To hinder timing analysis the hours and minutes of the time stamp could also be removed. Then the log can be published and whoever wants to can analyse it. Otherwise I suppose we need a bot to walk the modules adding and removing hit counter links. For a given degree of quality of statistics this would surely be a greater cpu and bandwidth load than log analysis. --kwhitefoot 19:25, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
The important thing is to get the data so that Wikibooks can be customised according to popular access paths and authors can get some feedback. The Apache logs are an excellent idea. If we can't get the logs then hit counters would be a backup position.
I suggest that, in the first instance, we ask for weekly logs without IP addresses or times. This request cannot be contentious and involves very little development work at the server end. It will give us the same data as would be provided by simple hit counters so we would need to be wary when interpreting it. Having got these we should ask for more complex data. RobinH 09:00, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
I'd like to point out that it would still require somebody with very high trust even among developers to put in the software for this sort of request. This is, however, something that would be of interest to people even outside of just our little project here, so creating a formal proposal on the Wikimedia Meta Wiki would be a good idea, as would creating a Bugzilla request for the developers that gets into some specific details about what sorts of information would be useful. The only way this is going to get accomplished with any speed, however, is to get directly involved with trying to code something like this. Still, even bringing the issue up might get the interest of additional projects and other people with technical skills. --Rob Horning 13:00, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

I contacted one of the developers on this issue, unfortunately they do not maintain access logs - see: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Brion_VIBBER#Dump_of_Apache_Access_Log - he replied:

"We do not keep such logs at this time; our traffic level and proxy setup makes it prohibitive. --brion 22:27, 18 April 2006 (UTC)"

So, it seems that hit counters/hit sampling is the only possibility. RobinH 08:45, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

Policy Review

Wikibooks:Policies and guidelines has numerous policies that have not been cleared or implemented. Another user (Xerol Oplan) has proposed that these policies should be reviewed.

The most important omission is Wikibooks:Dispute resolution which begins: "Currently there is no official organized process to resolve disputes between users". I would suggest that Wikibooks:Ad hoc administration committee is put in place to plug the gap temporarily (even though the staff lounge is used for this purpose at present).

The next policy that needs immediate attention is Wikibooks:No personal attacks, this has received a majority of votes to be taken as an enforced policy but has not been moved to enforced status.

The Wikibooks:Editing disputes policy would probably stop edit wars and forestall most trouble and might be moved to a vote ASAP.

The list below summarises all the outstanding policies:

RobinH 18:59, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

I think we should reorganise Wikibooks:Policies and guidelines to make it more readable and start using navigational templates like the one in w:WP:NPOV. I think we should have several templates like this: one for policies/guidelines, second for book maintenance (vfd, copyvio, textbook planning), third for administration tasks (WB:VIP, WB:RFA). I think it's neccessary to allow new users to browse easily through our meta pages. --Derbeth talk 19:52, 10 April 2006 (UTC)
It would be useful to have some pruning first. The Dispute Resolution, Editing disputes policy, No legal threats, No personal attacks, No offensive usernames and Ad hoc administration committee proposal pages could all usefully be replaced by a single, short "Be Nice" proposed policy, which could then be adopted, Jguk 20:46, 10 April 2006 (UTC)
One thing to keep in mind is that we really do need a central place to hold these policy change votes. There is a place that has some of these votes, which is Wikibooks:Policy/Vote. Unfortunately, this page isn't being used nearly enough, and we need to start plugging through the rest of the policies like the no personal attacks policy and make sure it is linked to this main voting page somehow. I guess this is a policy question about how to make policies.
I hold the opinion that any Wikibooks user should be able to propose any policy change, and there should be a common place to let the Wikibooks community know that this policy change is being debated and voted on for approval. Far too many of these policy change votes have been taking place on individual policy talk pages, and even somebody as active as I am has missed many of these votes simply because I havn't been able to find even what page they are located at. A significant policy change such as WB:NP (this did get quite a bit of input, so I'm using this only as an example) should be widely advertised here, as well as perhaps even on the main page itself. When you make a policy change like the no dictionary policy, it shouldn't be decided by just a very few users by default because there is no apparent oppostion. Voting standards (the 20 edit minimum, for example) and details over what is being changed should be quite clear. There should also be a clear time limit on the voting, so everybody knows when it will be official, or when the issue will drop dead. There is no point for considering votes that are months old, or if a policy with little support suddenly gets a bunch of users who hurry up, vote to support (or reject) the policy, and then move to say "see, this is the result of the vote!" The time limit on voting also gives a neutral end to the voting process, so you can declare a winner or that the policy has been rejected. The No Personal Attack Policy vote lacks this feature, so it is still in "limbo" even though it is clear that this is an acceptable policy to most Wikibooks users. --Rob Horning 15:19, 11 April 2006 (UTC)
I made substantial changes to Wikibooks:Title pages and Wikibooks:Image use policy. Please see talk pages for details and feel welcome to leave any comments. --Derbeth talk 09:50, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Elevating Wikibooks:No personal attacks to enforced status

Wikibooks:No personal attacks has had an overwhelming majority vote to become enforced. I would like to propose that it is moved to "enforced" status. (This is partly a response to Rob's comment above. I will put an "enforced" tag on the policy (depending on objections to this action here of course). RobinH 08:44, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

The vote for the policy to be enforced was 4:1 and involved 10 users - a lot by Wikibooks standards - so I have tagged the policy as "enforced". RobinH 10:22, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Suggestion to Create Standardized Book Info Templates

I read the related section of Wikibooks:Bookshelves/Generation_2 and thought that we should expand on it. I'm suggesting to create templates not related to the academic content of each book. These templates would be stored as {{Book Name/Infobox}}, simply {{Book Name}}, or perhaps on their own namespace. The main advantage is that information could easily be added to a variety of places, especially those not thought of or in use yet.

Usage examples and advantages:

  • Cover page of a book - See Finance and Final Cut Pro. Wikibooks has often been criticized for not having unity between its books and this is an undisruptive way of adding that unity. Wikibooks from the same bookshelf, for example, can all have the same color scheme on the cover page bar, similar to related Wikipedia articles using the same infoboxes, and could all be automatically added to the same category.
  • Lists, specifically Wikibooks:Alphabetical Classification and the bookshelves. - See the two examples on Wikibooks:Alphabetical_Classification#F. Only having a book's name in the left 10% doesn't really help a user to pick out a good book quickly. Using templates would allow the books on a bookshelf listing to have a parameter added to or removed from the list en masse.

Sample Parameters:

{{Book Infobox|Finance|25%|shelf=Business
|dept=Social Science
|image=...
|category=...
|chapters=...
|prerequisites=...
|authors=...
|alphabetical=F
|reading level=13+
|last update=April 10, 2006
|(short) comment=stub
|notes=Equivalent to an introductory college course.}}

could produce

  • Infobox - standard template message
  • Cover page bar - on the main page of a book
  • Extended list entry - currently set for all Wikibooks namespace pages but can be limited to specific pages
  • Compact list entry - the same as the page name + {{stage}} listing currently in use, not currently set for anything

All parameters other than book name are optional, so templates can easily be created by bots or a simple {{Book Infobox|Finance|25%}} by a new user. See Template:Finance/Infobox and Template:Final Cut Pro/Infobox for more examples. --Hagindaz 22:01, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

I think this is an excellent idea, and I like how it is turning out. The only issue that IMHO needs to be resolved is the bookshelf organization, which I would like to see dealt with before we make a huge inroad into adding this template all over Wikibooks... especially in the book search pages. Dispite an initial burst of discussion, there hasn't been any additional work or alternate proposals for reworking the bookshelves. Barring none, I might just go in and be bold to make the changes. --Rob Horning 16:30, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for the support. Just to clarify, what I'm proposing here is the creation of book records templates. Adding it to search pages is just one example of its potential usefulness, and should be discussed later. If a bot creates templates for all books from all lists and bookshelves, simply adding [[Category:Alphabetical Classification|{{PAGENAME}}]] to {{Book Infobox}} would make forming an alphabetical listing by hand needless, so I think that this (whether standardized templates are a good idea) should be decided sooner rather than later (and their implementation later). Also a comment on bookshelf reorganization - I think it would be a good idea to first organize books into the categories within each bookshelf. Then we would only be taking into consideration the number of categories when creating bookshelves, rather than the total number of books. --Hagindaz 16:56, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
A problem here to keep in mind is that there are many new bookshelves, and some that are defacto bookshelves that were created by various contributors. I've moved most of these to the Wikibooks: namespace, but there are some others still out there, including Computer programming, which is really a bookshelf with some added material, and not a book per se. I agree that organizing books into categories would be a good idea, but there are some books listed on these alternate bookshelves that are not listed anywhere else. Knowing where to merge these bookshelves, such as Wikibooks:Biology bookshelf is one of the questions that is up for debate. Some bookshelves have really grown substantially and are in the same shape that the information technology bookshelf was about a year ago. I am now estimating that there are close to 1000 Wikibooks (my original estimate was about 700), and my current count is over 850 on the alphabetical page alone, and many of those aren't even on a bookshelf yet of any kind. I would hate to see a major effort go into classifying books into various bookshelves when in fact the whole organization is going to be thrown out, just in time to reclassify everything all over again. --Rob Horning 18:28, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
One way to bypass classification problems is to record the most detailed level a book could be at on the info template. So biology books would be templated as "Classification=Biology," then we would be able to change that on all biology books to "Bookshelf=Natural science" using {{Book Infobox}} if that's the shelf we decide to use. I would like to know whether it would be possible to add books from all pages books are stored at to a list and have a bot create the info templates with only the book name. If that's done, an alphabetical listing category would be generated automatically, saving a lot of work. (Note that I used category to mean "subsection of a bookshelf" above, different from my below proposal.) --Hagindaz 20:25, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Auto Generation of Classification Tables

I've been thinking a little bit about this, and it would be nice to automate the generation of some of these tables. This really is a database problem, where some ability to search Wikibooks on multiple criteria needs to occur. It is making me very tempted to try to brush up on php and try to join the MediaWiki developer team to at least add a plug-in to help us out with this task. I could try and write a 'bot to help deal with this issue, but this is something that really should be a permanent feature on Wikibooks and not something I or any one person can do and have everybody else plead that I update such and such table with some new information.

The Wikidata proposal on Meta is something that would be ideal. Perhaps a temporary solution needs to be implemented before the flexible database is added to Wikibooks? There are other options including the tools server that is hosted by the Wikimedia Deutschland chapter. This has access to the full Wikimedia database, including all of the Wikibooks pages, with all of the edits as well. I'm sure that there is a group of technically inclined people here on Wikibooks that could get together and help put something like this together that would help the project as a whole.

Goals I would want to have with auto-generated pages (including perhaps an improved Wikibooks:Top active???):

  • Content on that page should be updatable by any Wikibooks user. Perhaps restricted to only registered users or some other restriction if it chews up server CPU time, but any trusted user should be allowed access, and it should be "no big deal" to request access. This implies that any user could access the updated data. See Meta:List of Wikibooks for an example of an updatable page that ordinary Wikimedia users can update easily. I was thinking something like this for other dynamic pages as well.
  • The source code should be available to trusted users to modify the way it works. Unlike the List of Wikibooks, this should not be on a private server that only one user has access to. Users and people come and go over time, and if things just aren't working out but need an overhaul, it should be available for a whole new group to go in and potentially rewrite the whole thing if necessary. Hosting on a Wikimedia-affiliated website would be a major plus, hence the request to use the tool server as a significant option.

If there is any interest in this at all, even just moral support, but other software developers who are interested in doing this, please make your mark below. I'm also starting up a page with Wikibooks:Content Tools to help with the coordination of various projects that can be done to help with the development of Wikibooks. --Rob Horning 14:24, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Wikibooks:Top active is not as interesting as a "Top Accessed" page. This would allow Wikibooks to market the most popular books most prominently and so draw in readers. RobinH 17:33, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
I would like to point out that the reason why the internal hit counters were disabled on the Wikimedia servers was because of the CPU processing time alone. By turning off the hit counters, the developers were able to get something like a 30%-50% increase in page throughput to end users (I really think it was this big). Of course page demand quickly ate up all of the available bandwidth, so turning the hit counters has not been a priority for quite some time. The solution of using a 3rd party server is an idea, and that is something very interesting to try out. It certainly would be interesting to see how our own generated stats compare to the stats being claimed by Alexa. --Rob Horning 02:08, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
Yes, that's a much better solution! I always thought we were limited by the MediaWiki software, and tried to think of ways to work around it. But integration into the software is clearly the better course. Best of luck in creating it. --Hagindaz 21:01, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Replacing Shelves with Portals and Categories

I decided to add this here because it relates to the above proposal.

Categories

At the present, I can't see how bookshelves are any different from categories. I also think using categories can provide easier access to a book, because they allow for several autmomatic classification methods.

An example with Category:Programming:

  • Category:Programming languages (all) (sorted by subsection)
  • Category:Programming languages (all) (sorted alphabetically)
  • Category:Programming languages (list of subcategories)
  • Category:Programming languages (sorted by completeness)
    • Category:Programming languages (completed books)
    • Category:Programming languages (75% complete books), etc
  • Category:Programming languages (sorted by difficulty)

Also having general categories (All books => Sorted alphabetically, sorted by completeness, etc). Books could be added autmoatically to all of these categories by adding "Classification=[type of programming language]" to the book's info template (proposed above).

Portals

All shelves are unique and shouldn't all have their contents displayed in the same fashion. So I propose the creation of individual portals by those familliar with the books on a certain shelf. The portal would also act as its own Wikiproject - listing stubs, collaborating between books, and creating book standards. This would be useful because experts in a specific field have general knowledge of related books, and many basic books are missing or incomplete.

Possible functions and sections:

  • featured book
  • list of popular books
  • related wikiversity schools section (w/ links, classes currently enrolling, and news)
  • portal collaboration of the month section
  • which books are for who, books for beginners on the subject section
  • stubs for popular or general subjects section
  • news on book developments and changes section
  • to-do list / maintenance tasks for books section
  • list of book series section
  • list of subsections (linking to the categories) section
  • list of sort types for all related books (linking to categories) section
  • links to related vfd discussions and proposed merges section
  • collaboration between similar books (examples: 1, 2, 3)

--Hagindaz 20:25, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Programming languages are not a good example, because they are overrepresented. This is a very specific category of books being specially popular here on Wikibooks. Other bookshelves are more general and it's not easy to link all of them. Take Science bookshelf - there is physics together with neuroscience. I don't think there is much sense in sorting Physics books in lots of different categories, because there is too few of them.
Also, categories can only show title of book. With bookshelves, you can provide a brief description of a book, show its stage development and for example availability of print version.
When it comes to portals - there's a similar situation, Wikibooks don't have much active contributors and I fear most of such portals would be dead. If Book of The Month wins with less than 10 votes, how can we maintain: to-do lists, current lists of stubs, current VFD's and so on? I think it's completely unreal in present state of Wikibooks. --Derbeth talk 21:12, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
Of course Physics shouldn't have its own category! But science should. The science category would be divided into subcategories offering books sorted by type (physical, biological, etc), completion, etc, just like programming. Physics books would be sorted into a lot of "Science" categories, not its own set of categories. I'm talking about applying this only {{Bookshelves}} deep. The beauty is that you wouldn't have to manually sort books. If the info template of a Science books says "status=75%" and type="science", it automatically goes into all those categories. That's not possible with bookshelves. I agree that only showing the title of a book can be a problem. but in the case of print versions, there's already a category for that, and its relatively empty. As for portals, I think it's reasonable to assume that at least one person on a shelf of dozens of books is willing to create a portal. Other than collaborations, which wouldn't be done on the portal page, I don't think the portal page would have more upkeep required than could easily be done . --Hagindaz 21:37, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
The thing is that bookshelves are portals! I think this is mixing terminology with function. There is no reason to have each bookshelf be so rigid as it is just a carbon copy of the next one, and indeed each bookshelf does have a little bit of unique flavor to it... especially if it is a bit older and has had some different people working on it. The only reason why the bookshelves look similar right now is because they have all been maintained by essentially the same group of people.
The problem I have with the categories is that they are so rigid in terms of what content is displayed that you can't add things like the Wikibooks stages icons, links to PDF files, "main discussion page", or a list of all sub-modules. The category setup works very well for Commons and Wikipedia, and it was built with those projects in mind. For Wikibooks, I would almost ask to have the whole category system shut off completely. There certainly is no need to categorize each and every page in Wikibooks, and Special:Uncategorizedpages is particularly useless here on Wikibooks. Special:Wantedpages is a close second most useless page on Wikibooks, and Special:allpages being a very close 3rd. Special:prefixindex, on the other hand, is more valuable on Wikibooks than it is on Wikipedia. BTW, WB:NP has actually helped improve the allpages, but most of that is currently garbage and improvement is relative. It isn't too hard to go from awful to nearly awful.
Another drawback to categories is that it is very difficult to tell if a subcategory is empty, or links to a hive of 1 million different modules/articles. Perhaps I would like to look at all of the books in the Computer Department, for example. Unless you do the incredibly redundant multiple linking in both the parent and child categories, you can't pull this list out. And some pages are linked on the parent category but no the child category and vice versa, with no tools to reasonably search for inconsistancies here either.
The one advantage that categories have over just about any other MediaWiki feature at the moment is that you can add the category links from within each book as it is created. This gives some flexability to content developers, and lets the authors create the category references, for where they want to catalog the content. It is also harder to vandalize categories without a bot, although that is a two-edged sword in the sense that if you want to reorganize a category (pushing content into subcats), you need to edit each and every module that needs to be moved. I've done that on Commons, but it is a pain.
I think there is a role for categories, however, and it is a powerful tool if we can really get a handle on how to use it properly. Some books, like the Cookbook, have really taken advantage of the category system and used it to its full potential. There are some Wikibooks like RuneScape that IMHO could try to do the same thing for some of its content. Its role within Wikibooks for the project as a whole with a single hive of links is somewhat more questionable. --Rob Horning 15:55, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
Yes, I agree that the current categories system is useless. I want to create a main "bookshelves"/"all Wikibooks sorted by type/genre" category, with the subcategories being those now found in {{Bookshelves}}. The subcategories of those would only be the various sorting methods. My proposal is highly dependent on whether Wikibooks decides to use records templates for books. If the records tempalte states "classification=physics" and "status=100%" {{Book Infobox}} would automatically include the book in the "Science/type|Physics," "Science/alphabetical," and "Science/completed," subcategories of a main "science" category. If, whenever Science gets too large and a new Physics shelf (portal+category) is created, you would only need to change {{Book Infobox}} to categorize Physics book on their own. Many other ways to sort books, such as the last updated date, would also be possible.
I guess I want the portals to act as the short templates at the top of bookshelves, and the categories as the book lists. There are very few high quality books on Wikibooks. I would guess less than ten. So I think the best way to highlight those books while still giving attention to important stubs and encouraging development of those stubs is with portals. Am I wrong in believing that the bookshelves don't perform that function? Portals would also be future-proof: if the number and quality of subsections (physics books, for example) increases to those of the general sections (such as all the science books right now), they can be split off into their own portals, highlighting the best physics book and encouraging development of important stubs. But I'm not going to push the issue. You two know a lot more than I do on what's best for Wikibooks, and I just wanted to throw my ideas out on the table. --Hagindaz 20:55, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Interactive Self-test Template

I made a template called "Peekaboo" to provide a degree of interactive, self-test abilility to Wikibooks. A question is placed in the first box, then by clicking on the [Show] button to the right, users can reveal the answers in the second box without leaving the page. Everything prints out as currently displayed on-screen. Hopefully this will be useful to a few of you and help some Wikibooks. -- Everlong 02:17, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Example:

Question

Answer

Example code:

{{Peekaboo|Question|Answer}}
Yes, like {{solution}}, it will be especially useful for Puzzles, which has a lot of one word answers on separate pages. You might also want to change {{qif|test={{{2|}}}|then={{{2}}}|else=70%}}, since {{{2}}} is already used by the answer. --Hagindaz 02:23, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
I was unaware of the existence of {{solution}}. I just came up with it after seeing a [Show/Hide] link in someone's TOC template. I'm still a bit mystified by all the markup, and the Template:qif page wasn't very illuminating, so how would I go about fixing qif? Change it to an unused number? What does that line do anyway? -- Everlong 02:35, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
The show/hide part is HTML. For whatever reason, it starts open/shown unless there is more than one "NavFrames" there, so I got around that by calling "NavFrame" and then closing it at the end. For some ideas of using it, see my {{French Exercises}}. Also check pages with the template using internet explorer, as it sometimes renders it wierdly.
{{qif|test={{{2|}}}|then={{{2}}}|else=70%}} states that if {{{2}}} exists, dispay {{{2}}}, otherwise display 70%. So, if you type {{{Peekaboo||100px}}, the width becomes 100px. You can delete it since there probably wouldn't be situations where the width would be changed. For future reference, {{tl|switch}} is a similar template, in the format <nowiki> {{switch|{{{1|}}}|case: a=b|case: c=d|default=e}} . "If you type {{templatename|a}}, you get b where a would be, etc.." See w:Wikipedia:Qif conditionals and m:Template talk:If. For a real-world example, see {{French Table}}.--Hagindaz 03:12, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Reverting vandalisms

I occasionally revert a vandalism from an IP address. Often it is the only vandalism from this IP. I was wondering what else I should be doing. I generally leave a {{subst:test}} message at the IP's talk page—though a quick look at WB:VIP suggests that this is not the usual practice except for logged in (non-IP) vandalisms. Since some IP's have multiple users, that may be the better practice. I also usually do not report the vandalism to either WB:VIP figuring that it is for recurring or unreverted vandalisms. So, should I be continue adding {{subst:test}} to IP address talk pages? Should I be reporting these somewhere (such as WB:VIP, even for only one reverted vandalism? Is there something else I should be doing? Thanks. --JMRyan T E C 20:09, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

It is not necessary to report occasional reverts of vandalism. If you find a user or IP that vandalises a lot, or a page that attracts much vandalism, you can report it at WB:VIP. In general, use WB:VIP when you want to alert other users. Also use WB:VIP if you need an administrator to block a vandal.
If you want, you can leave messages on the User talk page. I leave a message when I feel like, for example: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]
There is no standard procedure for contacting such users, and sometimes I do not. However, I do suggest that you avoid any "user talk templates" such as Template:Test. I find that user talk templates are good only as suggestions; none ever seems to say what I want to say. If you insist on using a user talk template, check that it is not redundant to something already on the user talk page. English Wikipedia has abused user talk templates badly, and provides examples of how NOT to use user talk templates: [6] [7] --Kernigh 23:17, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Wikibooks:State of the Project/2006

I've been thinking of trying to put together a formal report to the Wikimedia Foundation and other Wikimedia users on behalf of Wikibooks and what we have accomplished over this past several years. Some really interesting and amazing things have occured, including some changes that people from outside of the project may not be aware of.

Technically, there were supposed to be monthly reports written up by community members and filed on meta:Reports, but the last report for Wikibooks was file in January 2005, and it has been a year since even Wikipedia filed a report on this page.

What I'm proposing to do is to try and come up with something that represents all of Wikibooks, including the non-English projects if possible. I know there isn't a forum for dealing with the other languages of Wikibooks, but I'm hoping some of the editors here could help out in that regard as well. I would like to emphasis on some of the positive aspects of what has happened, including the print versions of Wikibooks (aka PDF files), significant milestones achieved, and some examples of outstanding content that has developed with Wikibooks.

The intended target of all of this is for the Foundation Board itself as well as for the other Wikimedia projects, but I would like to include this in Quarto as well as perhaps even make it well written enough that it could be used as a formal press release on the three-year anniversary of this project.

Obviously there is no huge rush to get this done, but it would be nice to get some things put together to show Wikibooks in a positive light. There are some misunderstandings from regular users on other Wikimedia projects that don't understand what goes on here, as well as some confusion by the academic community over what Wikibooks could be. I would like to submit this to the Foundation a little before the anniversary date so they could review it and "approve it" as a formal press release, adding their own comments as well. Or simply use the big #3 as a chance to do some chest thumping and say that we are doing some cool stuff. This shouldn't be the work of just one or two users either, which is why I'm bring it up here. I'm also curious what anybody else thinks of this idea. --Rob Horning 13:33, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

Wiki Embassy

Hello All,

While thinking of ways to contribute to the Russian Language wikibook, I came across the idea of a wikibooks embassy. I have studied Russian for some time, but would like the exercises I write to be checked by a native speaker, and it would also be nice to have audio files created by native speakers. It would be nice, I think, to have an “embassy” page where speakers of different languages could collaborate their efforts, and request help in translation. Also, wikibooks in different languages with fewer modules might want to translate some modules from en.wikibooks (and vice versa)- similar to translating pages in Wikipedia.

An “embassy” page would be a forum for communication between two wikibooks languages (where writing in either language would be acceptable?), and people speaking different languages could better collaborate their efforts: this would be invaluable for language modules. Also, people seeking help in writing modules might ask for help from others who speak other languages, even if through a mediator who speaks both languages. It seems to me that this would improve both the English wikibooks page, and those pages in other languages.

A similar idea for Wikiversity (which I do not really keep up with) is a collaboration with WikiNews, where people studying languages could translate WikiNews articles from one language to another, perhaps with a “head editor” to look over their translations, and provide feedback for them.

I would love some feedback on this idea. Do you think the Russian Wikibooks Staff Lounge is adequate enough for this type of communication? Does something like this already exist? Where would this page exist: would there be a Russian embassy page on en.wikibooks, and an English embassy page on ru.wikibooks? Is translation simply too hard (and high-paying, and time-consuming) of a job to find people to do it for free, even in this community? DettoAltrimenti

There is already an "embassy" system at MetaWikipedia:Wikimedia Embassy. This lets you send messages (in English) to foreign-language Wikibooks. However, en.wikibooks did not have an embassy; as of 25 March 2006, User:Everlong is listed as ambassador, but we still do not have an embassy page like de:Wikibooks:Botschaft. --Kernigh 01:09, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
I would like to point out that if you want to solicit help for translations between different languages, or to be able to solicit some help on inter-language issues, a good page to look at would be meta:Translation, which includes a list of users and what languages they speak, and what languages they are willing to translate from. meta:Category:Users by language has some additional people you might want to look at as well.
In terms of a general embassy for common inter-project relations, I think this is a good idea as well, especially if you note that less than half (and going down) of all Wikibooks content is in languages other than English. And there are some common problems to all Wikibooks projects that could use some cooperation. Currently Wikibooks does not really speak with a common voice, or is dominated by en.wikibooks. That is not necessarily a healthy thing. There are some cross-project social links like User:Derbeth who is also an admin on pl.wikibooks, and I've certainly been active on meta as well. I've thought about trying to add my name as an ambassador, but I have avoided it because I felt my plate was already too full. I'm glad that Everlong has decided to try and take on that issue. --Rob Horning 13:26, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
I think we should make wider use of our meta page: meta:Wikibooks. For example, Wikinews created projects like meta:Wikinews/Interview of the month. Language books seem to be a natural place for interlanguage cooperation. Instead of discussing this issue in general-purpose "embassy", we can create a project page at meta. --Derbeth talk 21:22, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
Paul, I wrote a proposal on your talk page. The Russian Wikibooks Staff Lounge, or the Форум as we call it, certainly is an appropriate place for enquiries such as yours. Actually, I am now in your Staff Lounge with a similar idea. I believe that we should make a cross-language Wikibooks forum (Staff Lounge, Village Pump, — whatever) for common issues. Ramir 04:33, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

Educational Technology Innovation and Impact/Virtual Learning Environments/Virtual Classroom

This module was posted by Rkshiwed, marked {{copyvio}} by myself Kernigh, then blanked 3 times by 143.53.157.209. I am not reverting it a third time; I am not deleting it because 143.53.157.209 might not be a Rkshiwed. I will let other users handle this situation now. --Kernigh 01:00, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

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